How Hamas is Reasserting itself in Gaza

How Hamas is reasserting itself in Gaza using money, manpower and force.

Daily Telegraph article

It seems a little ridiculous on this side of a retaliation against fresh Hamas rocket attacks in Israel that Israel will be called cruel and disproportionate and 'a bully', but undoubtedly it will happen. Protests, checkered scarfs, fog horns.... what a crazy world.

Israeli "Brutality" in Gaza

In the current invasion of Gaza by Israel to root out and put an end to Hamas rocket attacks, I certainly don't stand in complete solidarity with Israel, but I am far more with Israel than whatever body their enemy chooses to inhabit. In all the coverage I've seen and the articles I've read, there are questions the mainstream media is shamefully not raising.

What are the Palestinian people doing, knowing that Israel's self-defense was inevitable, to stop the rockets being fired from homes with children in them, from schools, and so on? It's a deplorable tactic when you think about it. Hide artilery and use civilian facilities as launching pads so that when [reluctant] Israel takes action against these, they are villified for kiling children, and so on. Surely, Hamas and the landowners who lend use of their homes to Hamas (perhaps the childrens' own parents) are responsible for holding their children in front of them while they are being shot at. It's a ridiculous notion to hold Israel responsible for brutality when it is obviously the fault of the heartless others.

Why are Palestinians not separating themselves from Hamas? Why aren't Palestinians rising up against Hamas perpetrators to stop the Israeli defense campaign? Why do rockets continue to fly into Israel from Gaza, even while a ground force has gone in? Why aren't they getting as far away as possible from store houses and launching pads? Why are parents putting their children in harm's way, even sacrificing them?

With all the rallies happening around the world today, I doubt many people are looking at this conflict realistically. What should Israel do to defend itself against rocket attacks short of a ground invasion?

Odds & Ends

I have had a lot of time on my hands lately so I've been doing a lot of looking into things and, apart from becoming completely cynical and near-paranoid (in a good way!), I have come to understand some new, "alternative" perspectives on the world. Some not so alternative. I'm going to share with you some of the things I've seen:

Zeitgeist: the underground movie everyone is talking about, which questions our entire grid for understanding our reality, including religion, politics, wars, media, and everything in between. It's a film I don't agree fully with, but we can't ever agree fully on anything anyway. Prepare to have your faith tested, and your eyes opened. Highly recommended!

Freedom to Fascism: Aaron Russo's film which questions the legality of the income tax and attacked the growing authoritarianism in American life.

The Century of the Self: a 4-part documentary which aired on BBC in the UK. "This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." This documentary is VERY GOOD! It offers quite a different, less-sinister (or more sinister?) view on the "ruling elite", and is very well done.

Biblical Nutrition 101: this free e-book is quite cheesy, and if you don't mind the sales pitch, you'll be presented with a great case for a diet change. I found this after I had already made my diet changes and had begun working towards a mostly raw vegan diet. It'll make you think for sure!

Red Pill Reich: the blog of a nurse who, in her words, is "shattering the myth of modern medicine". The most recent post on the site is from mid-2008 and it says she's faced some unnamed pressures to cease posting, but she has left all the valuable information up. She discusses the pharmaceutical industry (origins and practices), the medical establishment, perscription drugs, the effort to "manage" disease rather than cure it, the toxicity of vaccines, the fluoridation of tap water (btw, check this video out) and so on. This site is a must for anyone living in North America.

Positivity Blog: I've noticed that the information I've been feeding on has been a little unbalanced and has become a little too weighty at times. There is a need for me to not think so much and to find some hope and encouragement. Enter the PositivityBlog.com; take a look, I think it explains itself.

TED: Wow, what a great site! A collection of talks by some of the greatest minds alive today. This is like doing sudoku; they really get you thinking!

I may have put my blog on some watchlist by mentioning some of these things, but oh well. Enjoy!!

Disaster Capitalism

I read an excerpt from a book called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein here. In it, she describes the actions of people like Milton Friedman in the days, weeks, and months after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Essentially, "within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools."

Another excerpt reads:

"For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock."

With this as an example, it seems there's been an evolution within capitalism so that absoultely everything is submitted to a corporation by any means necessary. With this mindset, a natural evolution takes place, and seems to be completely realistic. Here is what I mean:

Waiting for disasters to happen and planning to swoop in with corporate takeovers > Preventing measures to make these disasters impact less (like strengthening the dykes around New Orleans, etc.) > Actually weakening the dykes so that when disaster hits the effect is multiplied > Timing wreckage with disaster to avoid any "miracles" > The creation of "disasters" (terrorist events, wars, the boogie man in Afghanistan, the threat of disaster in the form of a pending epidemic, shootings, and so on... the media loves to help this cause).

My thought is that if there are large groups of people whose "optimism" in the face of "disaster" is actually veiled opportunism, then there are factions within those groups whose greed has been accelerated to the point where the truest form of "survival of the fittest" is evident. This leaves little to no regard for the well-being of the "lower class", or those who haven't been "fit" enough to amass large amounts of wealth. The mindset evolves to "it's their own fault", and they prey on the belief of many in the goodness of people.

This was also seen shortly after the United states "won" the war in Iraq, which was not a declaration of victory, but the sound of a starting gun for the bidding war on contracts in this newly acquired, oil-drenched land. This idea is quite familiar. In fact, it seems to be a trait of some prophetic character, given in Daniel 11:39...

He will attack the mightiest fortresses with the help of a foreign god and will greatly honor those who acknowledge him. He will make them rulers over many people and will distribute the land at a price.

This is disgusting, but sadly relevant to anyone who lives anywhere.

Prophetic Joseph

I have had the actions of Joseph as Governor of Egypt as described in Genesis on my mind as I've watched the unfolding of this whole-world financial crisis. If you're not familiar with the story, here's a quick recap:

Joseph was in prison, accused of attempted rape on the Captain of the Guard's wife, when he was brought before Pharaoh as a last resort to interpret dreams that had been plaguing him for several nights; Joseph deciphers with precision that seven years of abundance would come, followed by seven years of drought, and recommended he appoint someone to oversee the stockpiling of food resources over the years of abundance to avoid the ruin that would face Egypt if they didn't; Pharoah appoints Joseph, who taxes the farming nation a fifth of their production and oversees its safekeeping; when the seven years of drought hit, he sells the food (yes, sells) to the people whom he taxed as well as people from other nations who didn't have the foresight to prepare, and keeps selling until they are deprived of all their money (47:14), all their working animals, their privately-owned land, and then to top it all off, if they wanted food they had to give themselves as slaves to the service of the throne.

So Joseph bought all the land in Egypt for Pharaoh. The Egyptians, one and all, sold their fields, because the famine was too severe for them. The land became Pharaoh's, and Joseph reduced the people to servitude, from one end of Egypt to the other. Gen 47:20-21

Up until the last few months, I had glossed over this, presuming that because the implication was that Joseph did a good thing, that he did a good thing. But it seems to me now that this was actually quite a violation of the values that we hold these days as far as politics and laws go. Essentially, the natural occurrence of a famine was used to bring an entire nation of free, land-owning people into ownership by their unelected king. The text is clear that he "reduced the people", and it is suddenly shocking!

Now, I understand certain things about Genesis, whereby there are very many prophetic stories that may cause us to raise an eyebrow at their happening as historical events, but may do more to tell us about what's going to happen in the future. The sacrifice of Isaac is another such story, which is graphic and unthinkable, but which also prophesies the actions of the Son (so that we can recognize him and understand the redemption plan), and tells the story of the Father's love. This story of Joseph prophesies the work of Christ at the end, possibly enabling the servitude of all mankind to one head so that he could most easily swoop in and assume the throne created.

It seems the whole mortgage and banking collapse is much the same as this story of Joseph. It makes me uneasy that governments are providing bailout packages to the big banks and are actually purchasing billions of dollars worth of shares in them. They are purchasing large sections of the banks, which have put the vast majority of people into meaningless jobs, doing nothing more than a servant's tasks in order to keep living. To make it make even less sense, the government is using the money they've collected from the indebted people as a percentage of the wage they earn at their job - jobs these people keep in order to pay their debt - to give to and invest in the companies that have indebted them. And to take it one more step, these bailed-out banks have created the money they lent to "debt consumers" virtually out of thin air (ie. there is not enough currency printed to even come close to the amount of debt is payable out there), by legislation that allows them to use and lend out 90% of bank deposits. They charge usury on absolutely nothing, no paper linked to a piece of gold. The government is bailing them out?

The harsh reality is that the vast majority of Westerners have been sold the idea of slavery to debt as, very probably, the only way to survive. So we buy homes, and it is just so convenient that they are only affordable for the average worker if the amortization period is round about the length of time it takes us to reach retirement age. I saw somebody's Facebook status today, which read: "I owe, I owe, it's off to work I go", and it saddened me to think that this is reality for a great majority of people who work not because they enjoy it, but because they either owe enormous sums of money to the banks, or because they've bought into the "dream" that success is owing that much, or even less forunately, they work because they just can't keep up or get ahead.

Why this obsession with productivity? Why must life be centered around work? For the life of me, I've never been able to understand this. If we are the animals they say we are, why aren't we playing as much as animals are, socializing as much, getting as much rest as we need, and for heaven's sake, working just enough to meet our needs? Unfortunately, as "animals", the survival instinct kicks in and dictates the gathering of wealth to weather nature's storms and provide longevity for ourselves and our offspring.

Not much makes sense in this godless system of servitude when you really think about it.

Bill O'Reilly

You'd expect an interviewee to get more words out than the interviewer in "fair and balanced" reporting, as found on Fox News, wouldn't you?

I don't know what irks me more -- the fact that Bill O is a real person, or the fact that he gets his own show on Fox. He makes me feel very smart.

Idiot Parade

One stormy Hawaiian evening last week, I resorted to watching the CNN YouTube Republican Debate, which presented all of the leading contenders for alpha male of the elephant herd. A former Bush-lover myself, I was shown the distinct evolution in myself and my own views over the past several years as I became increasingly agitated by some of the answers given to the questions of the general YouTube audience. It was more than the transparent attempts to woo voters, as every true politician is an expert at doing, using slogans and buzz words and even dressing like the President, it was some of the idiotic and prehistoric standpoints that really bothered me.

Of particular irk, a question challenging the military’s ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy about gay service-people. See clip.

I was astounded by Duncan Hunter’s answer, which proposed that “most” of the young people entering the military come from “Judeo-Christian” (buzz word) families, and because of this, would be uncomfortable and unfocused on the task at hand (in combat) if one of their peers was openly gay. Duncan wants to protect these poor children from the real world, and prevent the metaphorical bursting of their bubble. He gets the home school vote.

Mike Huckabee, Governor of Arkansas, accepts the rights of homosexuals to be whatever they want, but seems to allude to the potential “conduct” of these people as something of a lower class breed. He gets the fundamentalist vote.

Governor Mitt Romney skirted around the issue, not really answering in the end, knowing full well his answer could make or break him with some in the audience. If you look closely you can see him sweat when Anderson Cooper presses him for an answer, eventually saying that he doesn’t know, he’d ask his military counterparts. I hope he gets nobody’s vote.

Back to Mike Huckabee, Governor of Arkansas. It was he who was filmed with a Mr. Rick Mercer a while back on a hilarious CBC show called “Talking to Americans”, where we get a kick out of displaying the ignorance of some of our neighbours by getting them to say things like “Congratulations Canada for finishing the Tunnel to China!!”. (Really, we just want to make ourselves feel better about our inferiority complex.) Anyway, Presidential-hopeful Mike Huckabee is featured with a congratulations of his own. While I like to point out this little knowledge gap of someone wanting the planet’s top job, I have to say, he wouldn’t really be taking the cake, currently being eaten by the man of the [white] house. Take a look at Mike.

I almost want to take my chance at becoming an American citizen JUST to NOT vote for any of these guys.

$611 Billion

Amazing what else it can buy

Non-Profit for a New Christian Homeland in North America

Yup, it's true. Take a look at ChristianExodus.org.

:) I have to keep posting these; they are ridiculous.